[Haskell-cafe] blanket license for Haskell Platform?

[Eric Y. Kow]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 21:46:21 +1100, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
> > - My user is concerned that a large number of having a large number of
> >  individual licenses even though textually identical modulo author,
> >  date, etc would mean a big hassle getting their lawyers and their
> >  user's lawyers to sign off on each and every license
> 
> Why do their lawyers all need to sign off individually for BSD
> licenses (which if memory serves all platform libraries have to be
> licensed under, or some variant thereof)?  At most it just means they
> need to lump them all into one big text file somewhere saying which
> libraries they used... (then again, IANAL, and don't charge by the
> hour to consider these complex technical questions :p).

I find the whole thing baffling myself.  I'd thought this would be the
sensible thing to do, but I guess when it comes to these licensing
things it's not the actual pain that counts, but the perceived potential
pain.  Know what I mean?

It's similar to the "won't touch with a 10ft pole" attitude to the GPL
that some entities may take.  It's basically a precautionary "la la la;
I can't hear you" or a conservative stance which consists of
"I don't understand this stuff, so I'm going to do the thing that seems
safest to me", which may or may not be a reasonable reaction...

> Well, it would need copyright attribution/agreement of everyone that's
> ever committed code to any library/application to the Platform (which
> is why so many large projects want it) to re-license them AFAIK, which
> may be difficult.

I could just say it'd be unrealistic.  Just trying to be thorough.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://erickow.com>
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